Paving the way through piracy

Dressed down in court and labelled a maverick, Mildura's Max Thorburn defied a monopolised media industry when he decided to broadcast without a license for 77 days. Unlike his tarred and feathered forerunner, he managed to stay the course - paving the way for independent media to be established in the regional town, and celebrated as part of World Radio Day.

The building that houses Sunraysia Community Radio sits like a rose amongst the thorns in an industrial estate in Mildura's east.

Its walls are lined with tributes from country music personalities, the studio littered with vinyl.

A well-worn carpet leads the way to a back room, where the voluntary general manager of the station resides.

Max Thorburn is just about part of the furniture here, and takes little time to get into the history which ties him to the station.

Starting his media career at age 13, writing football reviews for the Mountain District Free Press, Mr Thorburn spent years working for the family that used to run Mildura's media in exclusivity, providing the newspaper (Sunraysia Daily), radio station (3MA) and television station (STV8); but he ended up becoming better known for forming an opposition to it.

"You've got to understand, that from 1929 to 1982, when I came along, no one had really bucked the system," he says.

"There was no independent or outside news source."

When Mr Thorburn applied for a license for a new local radio station in 1981, the move was hotly contested; a hearing before the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal - a forerunner to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), ended up in his defeat.

"It was a media closed shop," he says.

Mr Thorburn says he was the first to have gone against the grain of the media establishment since 1929, when the publisher of the Merbein Sun tried to open a rival newspaper to the Cultivator (the forerunner to the Sunraysia Daily).

The man, known as Grant Harvey, was supposedly tarred and feathered before being chased out of town; but Mr Thorburn was more persistent.

During the 1980s the station had been granted the right to test transmissions, which gave Mr Thorburn and his colleagues the opportunity to broadcast for a week at a time, several non-consecutive weeks a year.

"Quietly I made a decision, and it was on my head; we didn't turn the transmitter off," he says.

After 77 days, the authorities discovered that the station was still broadcasting and seized the transmitter, along with the tape recorder and the original tape that had been playing to air at the time.

Mr Thorburn was fined $1.00 for his crime - he claims to have only been the second to have received the charge, with the first being a fellow who broadcast without a license during the Second World War, 'when they were pretty jumpy'.

"I have to say in fairness, the people in the department didn't push it that hard; the law said that if they didn't lodge in court within three months, [the] documents, they couldn't keep the equipment that was seized; and I think they filed it three months and one day," he says.

"You can draw your own conclusions on that."

Mr Thorburn's hard-won license eventually came in 1991, when authorities agreed to put a supplementary license for the existing station in the town up for an open auction.

On the day, the community chose to leave the bidding to Mr Thorburn.

"It was the only license that I've ever known, commercial license, that sold at the floor price."

Mr Thorburn says he may have made a few errors along the way to pushing for a license to operate an independent station.

"I probably was a little bit too forceful, and I upset the government a bit."

Although he says he is still committed to the notion of media diversity.

"I believe that locals should have a greater say in their local media - why can't they?"